Literature

The poem was found among Gorky's papers after his death and was gifted by his widow, Agnes "Mougouch" Gorky, to Ethel Schwabacher as she was writing her monograph on the artist (see Schwabacher 1957). The original manuscript is now part of the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Arshile Gorky Research Collection" (1936–1993; Francis Mulhall Achilles Library, Archives). The verso of each sheet contains a drawing (see D1639 and D1640). 

The opening paragraph of Gorky's text is taken from René Crevel's poem, "The Period of Sleeping-Fits," which Gorky is thought to have referenced in the periodical This Quarter (vol. 5, no. 1, September 1932, pp. 181–88).¹ The poem is copied, in English, word-for-word with the exception of one identifiable orthographic error (noted below) and differing line breaks. In accordance with the original manuscript, Gorky's transcription of Crevel reads:

So many voices that were calculated even when the
speakers smiled ["d" crossed out] had disgusted my ears with hearing.
Over the two [sic] quotidian cobbles, my feet were dragg–
ing weighted miles lined with a shadow which yet
had no thickness. All the trees were in gallow's wood and
they were innumerable in the forest of repression
with its leaden foliage so thick that from dawn to dusk
and from dusk to dawn one did not dare to imagine
that some day, beyond the horizon and beyond
habit, there would burst a sun all sulphur and love.

According to the translation of Father Krikor Maksoudian (see Spender 2018a, p. 169), the subsequent text of Gorky's poem, written in Armenian and original to him, reads:

In this world there is no share for me.
They promise. They absolutely cannot respect the
value of a promise, O Myth created by me.
If their promise remains only words, then why do 
they make it?
I was asked to come here,
and the world is ruthless, ruthless, has always
consumed [everything] with fire and sword,
[inflicted] such pain before this understanding.
And the melancholy fire came under cover
of darkness.
As I absorb the morning, it comes only with pain
lying in my lap.
And in the end, I concluded that life is this: merely
nothing and a moment without hope and [full of]
pains.

The rays of nocturnal light make my soul ache as
they did when
a lewd cat [?] and my blue hopes died.
Tonight this place is awake
and yet at the same time,
there is here a song of suffering and my tortured
soul,
and darkness has diffused my soul.

^{1. René Crevel, "The Period of Sleeping-Fits," in This Quarter 5, no. 1 (September 1932): 181–188. Gorky used the same excerpt from Crevel's poem in a letter that he wrote to Corrine "Michael" West on August 24, 1936. See: Matthew Spender, ed., Arshile Gorky The Plow and the Song: A Life in Letters and Documents (Zurich: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2018), 122–23.}

Partially reprinted in: Schwabacher 1957, Spender 2009 and Spender 2018a.